E3 2010: Red Faction Armageddon

Red Faction Guerrilla was a surprise for me as I didn’t expect the game to be as fun as it was. The Geomod engine offered up such visual goodness of carnage and destruction that sometimes I just stood there and marveled at the collapsing structures as I brought some landmarks down.

With Red Faction Armageddon, we’re going close quarters now though as the grandson of Alec Mason looks to save Mars from a new threat. It seams the surface area has been devastated and the folks have been forced to go underground. What took ten years to build though has been torn apart in only a few days by aliens that have been unleashed accidentally by the main character.

The E3 demo showed off some new gameplay elements. I’ll go into some of the familiar first. The nano forge is now a gauntlet on the arm of Darius Mason and you can still use it to reconstruct things in the world. One of the cooler things shown was a broken apart container with Darius rushing inside and using the nano forge to reconstruct the container around him providing him with a short window of safety.

There’s still plenty of destruction with heavy physics involved as the demo showed off the insane amount of interaction objects can have when falling apart on one another. As structures are destroyed, pieces fall apart and ping pong around other pieces that can cause even more destruction. If you’ve never seen it in Red Faction Guerrilla, you have to do yourself a favor and find some of the videos. This action seems as much and maybe even more so visually impressive with Red Faction Armageddon as I found myself just awed by the devastation one can cause.

A new magnetic weapon was shown where you shoot an object and then shoot another area where the object then would fly on the path towards the second shot location. You can get pretty creative on how to use this weapon. Tag a box and then an area behind a group of aliens and watch the box fly and mow them down like a runaway truck. One of the cooler scenarios showed was Darius using his nano forge to repair a broken concrete block and then sending that towards the enemies with the magnet gun. I can also see some puzzles relying on the physics of the engine and the magnet gun for completion.

Finally, a power suit was used to really take out the group of aliens attacking Darius. Stepping into the metal behemoth, Darius was able to unleash an enormous amount of firepower to take out the enemies as well as the structure needed to finish the mission. The power suit also allowed Darius to barrel through parts of buildings much like the backpack upgrade you can get in the multiplayer part of Red Faction Guerrilla. The power suit should give you that Starship Trooper feeling when going after the aliens.

It’s an interesting direction to go from the wide open world of Red Faction Guerrilla to the close in quarters of Red Faction Armageddon. It hearkens back to the earlier Red Faction games and from what I saw at E3, it looks to be a ton of fun. I mean who doesn’t want to just tear apart the world with the visual flair that the engine can provide you with. Look for Red Faction Armageddon next March.